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Unilever
a document comes back to life |
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We interviewed Mr. Pedro Beramandi, Technical manager of UNILEVER ARGENTINA and member of the Directive Council of the Argentine Accreditation Organization.
The main topic of discussion was the experience of UNILEVER with the use of an electronic system for document management.
Quality Enterprise: What is the concept that took you to adopt an electronic system?
Pedro Bermendi: As first concept we needed to count with a tool to organize our documents, but also that would allow people to make improvements. This is about assuring our culture of Quality. For this, we needed a system that would be very robust and friendly, taking into account; the size of our company, the variety of processes and people that would be involved as users. Taking this as a premise, I first researched our parent company and discovered that we did have a system called IQS, running on Lotus Notes. We then contacted SISDAM, since they also worked with the same platform, being certified in Lotus Notes with a similar product offer. After going through product demonstrations we finally chose their product together with their local support.
C.E.: How do people respond to these type of systems?
P.B.: I can tell you that in the OAA, Argentine Accreditation Organization, of which I am a member, we came to the conclusion that with an electronic system employees would review 20% of the company’s documentation. In our case with Loyal after 6 months of implementation, the actual value has been of 60% of all documents being reviewed. This occurred due to higher than expected employee participation, the fact that the software was sufficiently robust and the availability of resources offered by the organization, such as desktops in every work post.
C.E.: Can you establish a comparison between resources needed for a paper-based system versus an electronic system?
P.B.: That is a good question. If we consider 20% reviewing for all documents during six months on a paper-based system, the company would require a total of 10 employees to do the job. Resource would be calculated in terms of labor hours as well as paper rolls and all the material waste for re-process. With an electronic system using Loyal, any document changes would be carried out in less than 10 to 15 minutes. The main benefit would also be seen with the fact that employees are no longer fearful of making mistakes since all changes can be immediately corrected, and therefore feel more motivated to make improvements to all quality documents.
C.E.: What was the time frame to implement the system and how did this affect the certification process?
P.B.: The system had to adapt itself to the organization’s complex international requirements. UNILEVER has 270,000 workers worldwide and the Argentine division follows organizational guidelines. The implementation time was 3 months, including training and having all document generation processes fully operative. The use of the system for the certification process was put to a test between the pre-auditing time and the actual audit. This was an important period to verify that what was being done was both conscious and genuine. For a successful implementation, it is necessary that people adopt the system as part of their daily use, go through changes, errors and apply the creativity to do so. This is the road-map to a good certification process. In our case the time taken to certify was 18 months. The most important end result to be gained with the use of an electronic system, was the possibility for the quality culture to be spread across the organization more effectively.
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